Bad Laws, Fishy Delays, And Polling Place Headaches Show The Election Integrity Movement’s Work Isn’t Over
After the questionable election results of 2020, a number of people delved into the complicated world of election laws and tried to understand what happened. Was there cheating? And if there was, how can we make sure it never happens again?
In response, regular citizens, attorneys, data crunchers, political watchers, and an elections-focused team of reporters at The Federalist dedicated themselves to monitoring and reporting on election issues.
But President Joe Biden and the leftist media want to pretend that concerns about election integrity are a thing of the past after Tuesday’s election.
“I hope we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system. It is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent. And it can be trusted, win or lose,” Biden said in his post-election White House speech on Thursday.
“After Trump Took the Lead, Election Deniers Went Suddenly Silent.” a New York Times piece claims. “Trump supporters spent years fomenting concern about election integrity. On Tuesday, they set it all aside.”
But Republican voters know that the vigilant work of identifying weaknesses in our elections were vital to President-elect Donald Trump’s win and must continue, especially when a few votes can vastly impact the outcome of an election.
The tight presidential results in Nevada, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where this week’s election was not untouched by troubling incidents, prove that election integrity is of utmost importance since every improperly counted ballot can have severe consequences.
In Milwaukee, an unsealed tabulator machine caused a recount of around 31,000 absentee ballots. As The Federalist’s Matt Kittle previously reported, observers found “layers of issues” in the counting of ballots in Milwaukee and concerns about chain of custody issues and delays in counting.
The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood previously reported about a Nevada law that throws complications on an already complex voting system by accepting mail-in ballots with no postmark up to three days after an election. And every election, Nevada requires election workers to mail an unsolicited ballot to everyone on the state’s active voter registration list, so you get a ballot even if you decide to sit this election out.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) and Nevada GOP challenged the undated late ballot rule, but the court upheld the law.
In September, Arizona election officials learned that around 98,000 voters had been registered without showing documentary proof of citizenship, Fleetwood wrote in another piece for The Federalist.
Arizona and Nevada have still not declared a winner at time of publication. Nevada has counted 90 percent of the vote, while Arizona has only counted around 70 percent.
An absentee ballot for Washington, D.C., arrived in a Michigan mailbox and addressed to someone who never lived there, Federalist reporter Logan Washburn recently wrote. Last month, Washburn reported the city of Detroit lost and entire tray — around 300 — mail ballots.
As I reported a week before the election, multiple Pennsylvania counties received bogus voter registration and mail ballot requests in a large-scale ballot harvesting operation. Several district attorneys were investigating it criminally. The election is over; the investigation is ongoing.
In Cambria County, Pennsylvania, ballots were not scanning in the voting machines across the county on Election Day. It tool election officials hours to fix the problem by providing new ballots that the scanner would accept. Voters who arrived when the scanners were down voted on paper and handed their ballots in to be counted by hand. It caused such delays that the county got permission from the court to extend the hours of the poll from the planned 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Reporter Brianna Lyman investigated four counties in Georgia that made last-minute policy changes to suddenly extend the ballot drop-off deadline for absentee ballots.
Lyman also reported on the 11th hour Georgia Supreme Court case brought by the Republican National Committee (RNC) that opposed Cobb County’s plan to accept 3,000 absentee ballots after the Election Day deadline. The RNC won that case and prevented votes from coming in after Election Day.
Then there were the six noncitizens indicted in Ohio after they allegedly voted in past elections. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced the indictments shortly before Election Day 2024.
In North Carolina, a single-family home had 32 voter registrations, Breccan Thies reported for The Federalist. Most of them were registered as Democrats, he found, and many registered at that address are suspected of unlawfully voting. Some may have no connection to Lee County or even North Carolina.
There is no shortage of similar examples from this election cycle, and many more that go unreported. While some are mistakes, they show vulnerabilities in our election systems that everyone should want to fix. Corruption matters, even if it doesn’t change the outcome, because it is a path that can be used for future cheating if not stamped out.
In a climate where Trump was the target of assassination attempts on the campaign trail, it is clear that there is an element that would do anything to win an election, including cheating. That is why we must stay vigilant on election integrity in every election.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
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